March 2008

March 31, 2008

We upgraded a solution that uses Crystal Reports from .NET 1.1, to 2.0 and then 3.5 a little while ago and it has been undergoing a full test of all of the functionality. We found that the reports would not load with the following error...

CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine.LoadSaveReportException: Unable to find the report in the manifest resources. Please build the project, and try again.

There are some other possible solutions/workarounds that I found for this, but in our case it seemed to actually be the namespace of the report files that VS2008/.NET 3.5 did not like. The directory and last part of the namespace involved was "Report Files", i.e. with a space. Changing this to "ReportFiles" has seemingly fixed everything.

March 27, 2008

After skipping Cokefest in 2007 when I heard that Guns n Roses (or rather Axl and some other people) were no longer coming, I decided that we had to go to this year's Cokefest. We ended up going to the Cape Town one at Kenilworth Race Course and I have to say that it was really awesome, which considering I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt when it got really cold, is saying a lot.

Organisation of the overall event was excellent I thought, with suitable close parking and more than enough food and beverage stalls/tents. We opted for parking opposite one of the pain entrances in what looked like a large school field which was great for getting in, but not so great (45 minutes) for getting out.

Highlights for me were definitely seeing Chris Cornell sing Black Hole Sun and Spoonman which we used to play over and over again as kids and both Muse and 30 Seconds to Mars were great crowd entertainers, including some acrobatic antics from Mr Letto. The main reason we went however was to see Korn and they didn't let us down, with Freak on Leash and ADIDAS resulting in a lot of screaming and some activity in the mosh pit, although I didn't venture there with my sandals on. Almost everyone came away looking like mine workers thanks to all the dust being kicked up.

Looking forward to next year, I have heard a lot of people wishing for the Chilli Peppers and similar.

March 15, 2008

As I tend to do from time to time, I googled our company name, "emediaIT". I expected to find our website at the top, followed by perhaps some newsgroup posts from our various employees, but could only chuckle when I saw...

I chuckled not because it was overly funny, but more because of how sad it was. To go to the trouble of paying to show up as a sponsored link when someone searches for your competitor, i.e. us, is nothing more than a pat (excuse the pun) on the back for the competitor. Thanks Placement Partner, glad to see that emediaIT and in this case our product, PeopleSource Recruitment, is on the right track.

Google has recently managed to seal their bid to buy DoubleClick, which now makes it the largest provider of online advertising by quite some way. There was a bidding war over DoubleClick between (you guessed it) Microsoft and Google. My question though is how could the European Commission possibly allow the largest competitor to Google in terms of online advertising to be bought over by them, while Microsoft keeps getting nailed with Anti-Trust law suits due to alleged anti-competitive behaviour?

The same or similar could be said about Verisign's acquisitions of both Thawte and Geotrust, their major competitors. Are there a different set of rules and regulations that apply to Microsoft that don't seem to apply to everyone else?

March 13, 2008

We are working on a project at the moment and the client's requirement is that there are multiple audit tables, i.e. an audit log table per source table that "shadows" the source table in terms of fields plus has the additional audit log information such as the UserId for example. They also required that the actual logging happens at a database level using triggers as not all inserts/updates/deletes happen through the business objects. We needed to do this quickly and also have a way of maintaining it when database changes happen. A quick search on the net produced...

Unlike Amazon's SimpleDB it is intended to give Microsoft's enterprise services and products a service delivery mechanism. One of the more interesting aspects I noticed about the service is that it is integrated with Microsoft's Sync Framework, which will enable SSDS to be a central hub for synchronisation of data form multiple and possibly very different devices to provide offline/online or "occasionally connected" functionality.

March 08, 2008

One of the more interesting projects I have come across lately has to to be Microsoft's research into creating an OS that is completely built on managed code. The project's official homepage can be found at...

For those who don't already know, Frans Bouma who is the lead developer for LLBLGen Pro (http://www.llblgen.com), which has been our choice of ORM at emediaIT for some time now is writing an excellent series of articles regarding how they are Developing Linq to LLBLGen Pro. It really is wortwhile reading for anyone that is interested in how the 2 technologies will fit together, but also if you are new to ORM and are wanting to compare the two and perhaps see where LINQ does not cover all bases, at least not yet.

Although Christmas was a little while ago, there were some people that went out of their to help the needy during the festive season. This included Desmond, Teniel Westenberg and their family who with the help of donations from various sources (Including emediaIT), managed to bring some Christmas joy to needy children and their families in the Port Elizabeth area.

Below is an email from Desmond...

On Christmas day we were able to make up food parcels for 78 people consisting of two hotdogs, a chocolate, chips and a cooldrink as well as a can of food.

Even though it was a task to find 78 people on that day as a result of the rain etc after some searching all the food parcels were handed out.

We were also able to donate a large amount of groceries to the Protea Place of Safety for the children there for which they were most grateful.

We also still have money left which will be used to purchase incontinence ‘nappies’ for the elderly at the Nazareth House and furthermore were also able to purchase Childrens T-Shirts which we will be giving to Oosterlig Kinder Huis.

...and some pictures can be seen below. Hopefully next year we can all come together and give even more back to the less fortunate.

March 05, 2008

We attended the Microsoft Jumpstart Devchat today in Port Elizabeth. The venue was the Spotted Cow pub/restaurant in Central which although not the most luxurious actually accommodated all of us quite nicely and the snacks were great. There were 6 of us attending from emediaIT and also decent attendance from the other IT companies in the area.

The speakers were both good, starting off with Eben De Wit (http://dotnet.org.za/eben/) and followed by Peter Willmot. They covered a range of new SQL Server 2008/Visual Studio 2008 features including...

SQL Server 2008 Transparent Encryption

Occassionally Connected Applications

Sync Services for ADO.NET

DMF Policies

Database Mirroring - Witness Server

BI Enhancements in SQL Server 2008

SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services & Analysis Services

New HierarchyID data type

Spatial data support - New Geometry/Geography data types

Filestream attribute for blob types

LINQ to SQL

LINQ to Entites

All in all it was worth attending, although I do wish that the session had been longer as there are a number of other new SQL Server 2008 features that I would like to have heard about. We did however join them both for lunch after the event and were able to pick their brain's/knowledge further. It is time that Microsoft brings the bigger/more comprehensive conferences/events to Port Elizabeth.

Update 06/03/2008: After further discussions with the rest of our team the general feeling is that there was too much focus on Visual Studio 2008, albeit including database tools, but not enough on the changes in SQL Server 2008 itself. The timeframe was also simply not enough and it felt like some topics were rushed, while others were skipped altogether. There were a few instances where the excercises did not go quite to plan, either because pre-requisites were not in place or because files could not be found.